Masa 😎
MSFT's earnings, Flipkart tries astrology, and India on the AI train.
🗓 Morning and Happy Friday!
Just like that, we’re at the end of January.
📈 Markets held steady yesterday with Sensex up 0.45% and Nifty climbing 0.56%, but investor sentiment continues to remain uncertain.
The biggest catalyst on the horizon could be tomorrow’s budget, and considering we’ve mostly treaded water for the past 6 months, hope is that the big move will be on the upside.
💡 Spotlight: SEBI just dropped the hammer on financial influencers. A new directive bans the use of live stock market data in educational content, forcing educators to delay price data by three months.
Few things worth going over from the $ world.
1 Big Thing: Masa returns with more cash troves 😎
SoftBank is reportedly in talks to pump $25 billion into OpenAI, at nearly a $340 billion valuation. This will be Softbank’s biggest bet since WeWork.
This comes days after Nvidia’s $600 billion wipeout triggered AI market panic, which underscores Softbank’s conviction.
Masa says the deal is linked to Stargate, with $15 billion going to build OpenAI’s $100 billion AI data center.
The timing is definitely bold, but nobody ever accused Masa of playing it safe. Despite a sentiment taking hold that Deepseek’s progress limits the need for massive AI infra, Softbank stands committed to this approach.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is restructuring to raise more for-profit capital—another sign that it needs fresh funding, fast.
The big picture: AI’s economics are shifting. If models can achieve high performance on lower-cost hardware, the trillion-dollar question is: is more money actually the answer?
SoftBank is betting yes. The markets aren’t so sure.
2. Big tech earnings delivered (sort of) 📊
December earnings from the Magnificent 7 giants are keeping western markets busy. Some of the stocks absolutely killed it, but the rest have been falling behind.
Here’s a quick round up of the key sentiment across themes:
Software: Expectations were high for Microsoft but Satya failed to excite the street, with softness in cloud growth and core enterprise businesses. But Microsoft’s AI growth was stellar, thanks to the OpenAI partnership — “our AI business has surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $13 billion, up 175% year-over-year.” Stock was down 7%.
Robotics and EVs: Tesla continues to promise the moon, with Humanoids and Robotaxis, but the company’s core car business is taking it on the nose. Revenues dropped 8% last quarter, not cool for a business trading at a 100x PE. Costs are going up, profits stalling, while the U.S. and China markets get flooded with cheaper EV models. Stock, unsurprisingly, finished up 3%.
Social Media & Ads: the biggest winner of the AI story has been Meta. Not only has Zucker managed to boost ad impressions across platforms through AI integration, he has managed to spend billions on AI infrastructure without investors scoffing, while leading with open source models such as Llama. Here’s the kicker, Meta’s apps are used by 3.4 billion people every single day. Talk about who can drive mass adoption of AI.
3. Flipkart wants to predict the future 🔮
Entrackr says Flipkart is looking to acquire astrology services provider InstaAstro for over $20 million, marking a serious push into spiritual commerce.
Outside of our urban bubbles, Astrology remains deeply embedded and closely tied to India’s consumer spending, influencing weddings, investments, and even career moves. The wave has created numerous venture-scale businesses.
The largest in the space is AstroTalk which is on track to make nearly ₹1,200 crores in this financial year, with 100% growth relative to last year.
Anyway, InstaAstro is a little further behind but well exposed to the opportunity. The company’s made roughly ₹25 crore in revenues in FY24. If the deal goes through, Flipkart is apparently rebranding InstaAstro as "Sukh”.
And another quick fundraise:
SuperOps, an IT ops solution provider, raised $25 million in a Series C round led by March Capital, with Addition and Z47 joining in.
The company provides services automation and remote monitoring tools, helping IT service providers leverage an AI-powered platform to manage their work more efficiently.
The fresh capital will fuel AI R&D, global expansion, and enhance its Monika AI platform with predictive intelligence capabilities.
4. Big daily mover 📈
Apollo Micro Systems jumped almost 10% after signing an MoU with Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd to power next-gen defence innovation.
The company provides electronic systems, network connectors, power management modules, and a range of other systems for defence, avionics, space and other end markets.
Context: the collaboration focuses on joint R&D, co-production, and supply of underwater weapons, air defence systems, and communication tech for India's security forces.
5. India wants in on AI 🏗️
After watching global AI giants like OpenAI and DeepSeek pull ahead, our government is finally stepping in to build its own generative AI model.
In a big reveal last night—India has secured 18,693 GPUs to power a large language model with proposals now open for development.
This would include nearly 14,000 state of the art NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, the cost of these systems could be well over $350 million.
The timeline is somewhere around six to eight months, according to Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
What’s ahead: the government is funding 18 AI-driven projects tackling agriculture, climate, and learning disabilities. Plus, a new AI safety institution is in the works to ensure responsible development.
We are officially in the race.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🚨DC collision: an American Airlines regional jet collided with a military helicopter while landing at Reagan National, with 64 people onboard. This is one of the deadliest crashes in US history in several decades.
🕵️ Probe on: OpenAI and Microsoft are investigating whether DeepSeek unlawfully used OpenAI’s data to train its model.
🚀 Threads surge: Meta’s Threads now has 320M monthly users, adding over 1M sign-ups daily.
🏬 Expansion: The Derma Co. opened its first exclusive store in Gurugram, marking a big offline retail push for the digital-first brand.
🤝 Meta-Trump: Meta has settled a lawsuit with Trump for $25 million after suspending his accounts post-January 6 Capitol attack
And that’s a wrap. Pour yourself an extra one this weekend.
We’ll be back like clockwork on Monday!
Hit that 💚 if you liked this issue.
